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Monitoring and Evaluation for Learning and Adaptation (MELA) Initiative

About Partnership Publications Projects Events People

What is MELA?

LEARNING FOR DEVELOPMENT IMPACT

Monitoring and Evaluation for Learning and Adaptation (MELA) is a holistic, learning-focused M&E approach that promotes learning for development impact at individual, program, and organizational levels. MELA asks two essential questions:

  • Why are things working (or not working)?
  • How can we do better?

By unpacking the assumptions behind programs, MELA transforms data into actionable learning that everyone — from field staff to leadership—can understand and use to make development programs more effective, relevant, and sustainable.

Traditional M&E primarily focuses on implementation quality and results measurement. In contrast, MELA takes a holistic approach, analyzing organizational capacity, context for change, and participant ownership — making it better suited for complex challenges such as system changes.

MELA balances the learning and accountability roles of M&E to enhance development effectiveness. By leveraging knowledge management, it enables organizations to continuously test, refine, and scale up impactful ideas.

What Does MELA Do?

The MELA team at BIGD supports organizations with learning-focused M&E services across the key phases of a program’s life cycle: preparation, implementation, and program evaluation. 

  • Strengthening organizational and programmatic readiness for learning-focused M&E. 
  • Enhancing capacity and collaboration to generate credible evidence during implementation. 
  • Facilitating program evaluation, collective reflection, and evidence uptake for adaptive learning.

Who Does MELA Work With?

MELA collaborates with:
• Governments and CSOs to foster learning and adaptation, driving innovation in complex context and scaling with evidence in humanitarian and development settings.
• Donors to facilitate systematic learning, ensuring cost-effective and high-impact development programs.

Innovations for Poverty Action (ipa)

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was created and signed between Innovations for Poverty Actions (ipa) & BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) to facilitate cooperation in matters of common interest in the area of Monitoring, Evaluation Learning and Adaptation (MELA). The ultimate goal is to strengthen long-term collaboration between IPA & BIGD and help explore the possibility of providing advisory services on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning. The collaboration between IPA and BIGD is set to organize capacity-building workshops and targeted institutional-strengthening actions for implementing organizations and donors, such as Theory of Change, M&E Indicators, robust evaluation methodologies, applied research methods, and other M&E-related workshops. In addition, IPA and BIGD will co-design and facilitate dissemination and policy outreach activities as well as the use of evidence in policy-making.

MEL Support to NGOs

BIGD is providing technical assistance in MEL to BRAC IED, ICDDR;b, BEN, and Synergos under the ‘Catalyzing WCD programme’ funded by Porticus in four crucial areas:

  1. Technical support in tool development for data collection
  2. Guideline development for MEL implementation
  3. Support in data analysis
  4. Provide MEL training

BEN has been provided training on developing a Theory of Change and technical support in shaping the outcomes and activities of their project under this programme.

BRAC IED was supported through insightful feedback and suggestions on their MEL framework. In addition, BIGD will review qualitative assessment tools to be developed by BRAC IED for observing government officials' perspectives on WCD, particularly those officials enrolled as their MSc. students in the ECD programme.

Icddr, b has been provided training on developing a Theory of Change which helped them understand how rigorous research can be supported and enhanced by right-fit MEL activities. In addition, BIGD aims to support them in developing data analysis mechanisms for the capacity assessment of health workers.

Synergos has been supported in developing the MEL framework for their project under this programme. In addition, BIGD aims to support Synergos in developing tools for the indicators they will use to measure the outcomes.

Project Name: Catalyzing Whole Child Development Programme

BIGD is working as the learning partner for the ‘Catalyzing Whole Child Development Programme’ in Bangladesh, aimed at understanding its impact on Early Childhood Development (ECD) systems. Additionally, BIGD is providing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) assistance and guidance to the implementing partners involved in this program. This program is funded by Porticus.

10

Dec '23

Learning and Reflection Workshop: Catalyzing Whole Child Development in Bangladesh

12:00 am BRAC Center

BIGD in collaboration with IPA has organized a two-day workshop from 10th December to 11th December 2023 to learn the policy landscape and implementation dynamics to embed Whole child development (WCD) for children in adversity into key...

06

Jun '23

Planning and Reflection Workshop: Catalyzing Whole Child Development in Bangladesh

12:00 am BRAC Center

BIGD in collaboration with IPA has organized a two-day workshop from 6th June to 7th June 2023 to co-design the learning framework with all the implementing partners (: BRAC ied, icddr, b, Synergos, Bangladesh ECD Network (BEN) and...

Mehnaz Rabbani

Mehnaz Rabbani

Director, Operations, Strategy, and Partnership

James W. Khakshi

James W. Khakshi

Programme Coordinator

Farah Muneer

Farah Muneer

Programme Coordinator

Tabassum Nishat

Tabassum Nishat

Research Associate

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